From a New York Times guest essay by Christopher Caldwell headlined “Something Has Changed on City Streets, and Amazon Is to Blame”:

Between 1961, when the social critic Jane Jacobs published “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and the Covid lockdowns of 2020, it seemed the residential neighborhoods of Washington, like those of certain other, mostly Eastern cities in the United States, had discovered the secret of happiness and safety in the automobile age: narrow streets.